Cutting Trees and Piling Branches

A Folk Explanation of the Citemene Cultivation of the Bemba of Northern Zambia

Abstract

The Bemba of northern Zambia have long practiced a unique slash-and-burn cultivation, known as the Citemene system. The uniqueness of the Citemene system is based chiefly on the procedure for clearing the woodland in which (1) men climb the trees and cut only the branches, after which, (2) women bring the branches, which have been well dried, to the center of a cleared area and pile them into a roundshaped bed, and then burn them in order to make a Citemene field.
Based on the research of the folk explanation of the Citemene clearing method, the following points can be clarified: 1) The villagers share the idea that it is necessary to refer to a “secret knowledge” in order to fully explain the Citemene clearing method. 2) This secret knowledge is kept exclusively by the elders of the village. The secret knowledge is mutually related to Bemba folk belief regarding the ancestral spirits as well as folk reproduction theory. 3) However, younger villagers know that there is such secret knowledge. They are even able to approximate the outline of it, if not detail it completely, because some key ideas of the secret knowledge can be discerned in various rituals. This understanding produces an idea among all villagers that there is a single “perfect knowledge” to explain everything in the world. 4) This perfect knowledge consists of the two different aspects of knowledge, one, the empirical aspect of knowledge based on daily experience and personal observation, and two, the knowledge resulting by connecting the different contexts of daily life and systematizing them to produce a cosmology. Such a structure, inherent to the folk explanation, gives a socially accepted grounding to the Citemene clearing method and supports the Bemba idea of “beautiful job” and “manhood.” This structure ultimately contributes to the maintenance of the Citemene clearing method and therefore ensures woodland sustainability. This paper analyzes this structure and discusses the Bemba sense of “agricultural technology”